Life and career

Steyn was born in Toronto. He was baptized a Catholic and later confirmed in the Anglican Church;[2] he was educated at the King Edward's School, Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. He has stated "the last Jewish female in my line was one of my paternal great-grandmothers and that both my grandmothers were Catholic".[4] He left school in 1978 at 18 and worked as a disc-jockey before becoming musical theatre critic at the newly established The Independent in 1986.[5] He was appointed film critic for The Spectator in 1992. After writing predominantly about the arts, Steyn's focus shifted to political commentary and moved to the conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph which stopped carrying his column in 2006.

Writing style

Steyn's writing draws supporters and detractors for content. His style was described by Robert Fulford as "bring[ing] to public affairs the dark comedy developed in the Theatre of the Absurd."[6] Longtime editor and admirer Fulford also wrote, "Steyn, a self-styled 'right-wing bastard,' violates everyone's sense of good taste."[6] According to Simon Mann, Steyn "gives succour to the maxim the pen is mightier than the sword, though he is not averse to employing the former to advocate use of the latter."[5]

Susan Catto in Time noted his interest in controversy, "Instead of shying away from the appearance of conflict, Steyn positively revels in it."[7] Canadian journalist Steve Burgess wrote "Steyn wields his rhetorical rapier with genuine skill" and that national disasters tended to cause Steyn "to display his inner wingnut."[8]Lionel Shriver wrote, "I love Mark Steyn ... however you may deplore his opinions, Steyn is funny."[9] Others have been less approving. For instance, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic wrote that Steyn was, "... long on colorful rhetoric but short on dry facts."[10] British journalist Johann Hari wrote in the New Statesman: "Steyn's prose has a jangling musicality; like Ann Coulter, he writes in a demonic demotic that makes you chuckle even as you retch."[11]

Positions

Criticism of media

In a May 2004 column Steyn commented that editors were encouraging anti-Bush sentiments after The Daily Mirror and the Boston Globe had published faked pictures, originating from American and Hungarian pornographic websites,[12] of British and American soldiers purportedly sexually abusing Iraqis.[13] Steyn argues that media only wanted to show images to westerners "that will shame and demoralize them."[14]Boston Phoenix media critic Dan Kennedy said that Steyn's column was an effort to "rally the spirits of his fellow warmongers: by demonizing anyone who dared to criticize the war."[15]

In a July 2005 column for National Review, Steyn amplified his dislike for the media. He criticized Andrew Jaspan, the editor of the Australian newspaper, The Age. Jaspan was offended by Douglas Wood, an Australian kidnapped and held hostage in Iraq, who after his rescue referred to his captors as "arseholes." Jaspan claimed that "the issue is really largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive." Steyn responded in his column by arguing that insensitivity toward captors is not the most important, and that it was Jaspan, not Wood, who suffered from Stockholm syndrome. He said further, "A blindfolded Mr. Wood had to listen to his captors murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how crude and boorish would one have to be to hold that against one's hosts?"[16]

In a January 2007 column in the Chicago Sun-Times, Steyn wrote that Barack Obama was "black, and white, and Hawaiian, and Kansan, and charismatic, and Congregationalist, and Muslim. [...] He was raised in an Indonesian madrassah by radical imams, which is more than John Edwards can say." He added, "The madrassah stuff was supposedly leaked to Insight Magazine ... by Hillary Rodham Clinton's team."[17] Two days later, Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times responded to Steyn regarding what she called the smear on Obama and the attack on Clinton. She wrote, "And there is no evidence whatsoever that Clinton's campaign had anything to do with spreading the damaging rumor that Obama hid a Muslim background." Sweet noted the visit by CNN's John Vause to the state-run elementary school in Indonesia that Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.[18]

Conrad Black trial

Steyn wrote articles and maintained a blog[19] for Maclean's covering the 2007 business fraud trial of his friend Conrad Black in Chicago. Questions were raised in the media over the objectivity of Steyn's coverage,[20] for example Andrew Clark of The Guardian, referring to Steyn as one of Black's "loyal supporters", quoted from Steyn's Blog, "If it is bad news, I'm sorry I won't be there to support my old boss ..."[21] Suanne Kelman wrote in the Literary Review of Canada[22] that the leader of Black's media cheering section at his Chicago trial was "above all Maclean's Mark Steyn, in both the magazine and his logorrheic blog." Kelman stated that Steyn began coverage with the view that Black's trial was a "cruel farce".

After Black's conviction, Steyn published a 7,500 word post mortem in Maclean's, excoriating Black's defense team and blaming them, with a list of others, for the outcome.[23] Describing the article, Toronto Star business columnist Jennifer Wells said, "... columnist Mark Steyn lifts his leg and relieves himself with the force of a Clydesdale in the direction of Greenspan and his co-counsel Eddie Genson." Wells concludes that Steyn was "... stingingly absurd to suggest that Conrad Black was done in by his lawyers. He was done in by the facts."[24]

Eurabia

Mark Steyn believes that Eurabia — a future where the European continent is dominated by Islam — is an imminent reality that cannot be reversed. "The problem, after all, is not that the sons of Allah are 'long shots' but that they're certainties. Every Continental under the age of 40 — make that 60, if not 75 — is all but guaranteed to end his days living in an Islamified Europe."[25] "Native populations on the continent are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic."[26] Steyn claims that Muslims will account for perhaps 40 percent of the population by 2020, but Globe and Mail correspondent Doug Saunders labels the assertion false:

Slightly more than 4 percent of Europe's population is Muslim, as defined by demographers (though about 80 per cent of these people are not religiously observant, so they are better defined as secular citizens who have escaped religious nations). It is possible, though not certain, that this number could rise to 6 percent by 2020. If current immigration and birth rates remain the same, it could even rise to 10 percent within 100 years. But it won't, because Muslims don't actually have more babies than other populations do under the same circumstances. The declining population growth rates are not confined to native populations. In fact, immigrants from Muslim countries are experiencing a faster drop in reproduction rates than the larger European population.[27]

Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since the second World War? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can't buck demography — except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out, as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you cannot outbreed the enemy, cull 'em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia's demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

Author and U.C.L.A. Public Policy Professor Mark Kleiman fears that Steyn is "justifying genocide, both retrospectively in Bosnia and prospectively in the rest of Europe."[29]Andrew Sullivan calls Steyn's book "an intellectually vulgar diatribe based on the crudest demographic reductionism"[30] and also wonders, "is Steyn actually advocating genocide? When you read the full context of the paragraph in the book (pages 4-6), there are no exculpatory words around it."[31]

My book isn't about what I want to happen but what I think will happen. Given Fascism, Communism and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it's not hard to foresee that the neo-nationalist resurgence already under way in parts of Europe will at some point take a violent form.

Criticism of multiculturalism

Steyn has commented on divisions between the Western world and the Islamic World. He criticizes the tolerance of what he calls "Islamic cultural intolerance." Steyn explains that multiculturalism only requires feeling good about other cultures and is "fundamentally a fraud ... subliminally accepted on that basis."[33] In Jewish World Review, Steyn argues "Multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture — the subjugation of women — combine with the worst attributes of Western culture — licence and self-gratification." He states, "I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture — rule of law, universal suffrage — is preferable to Arab culture."[34]

After a piece in which Steyn ridiculed Ayatollah Khomeni for giving advice on child abuse and bestiality,[35]Scott Horton, leftist lawyer and Harper's writer, commented on Steyn's writing, saying "it would be quite an understatement to call this language intolerant. Indeed, it can easily be paralleled with ethnic stigmatization that has occurred in the most vicious societies in modern times."[36] Steyn replied to this commentary, and others like it, by illustrating that his reference was founded in factual citation of the writings of Ayatollah Khomeni.[37]

Criticism by Christopher Hitchens of Mark Steyn

Christopher Hitchens believes that Steyn errs by "considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes; seeking asylum and to build a better life."[38] Nevertheless, Hitchens' review of his book America Alone was extremely favorable, calling it "admirably tough-minded."[39]

Support of Iraq invasion

Steyn was an early proponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2007 he reiterated his support while attacking DemocratJohn Murtha, stating that his plan for military action in Iraq was designed "to deny the president the possibility of victory while making sure Democrats don't have to share the blame for the defeat. ... [Murtha] doesn't support them in the mission, but he'd like them to continue failing at it for a couple more years".[40]

The Ontario Human Rights Commission refused in April 2008 to proceed, saying it lacked jurisdiction to deal with magazine content. However, the Commission stated that it, "strongly condemns the Islamophobic portrayal of Muslims ... Media has a responsibility to engage in fair and unbiased journalism."[43] Critics of the Commission claimed that Maclean's and Steyn had been found guilty without a hearing. John Martin of The Province wrote, "There was no hearing, no evidence presented and no opportunity to offer a defence — just a pronouncement of wrongdoing."[44] The OHRC defended its right to comment by stating, "Like racial profiling and other types of discrimination, ascribing the behaviour of individuals to a group damages everyone in that group. We have always spoken out on such issues. Maclean's and its writers are free to express their opinions. The OHRC is mandated to express what it sees as unfair and harmful comment or conduct that may lead to discrimination."[45]

Steyn subsequently criticized the Commission, commenting that "Even though they (the OHRC) don't have the guts to hear the case, they might as well find us guilty. Ingenious!"[46]

Soon afterwards, the head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission issued a public letter to the editor of Maclean's magazine. In it, Jennifer Lynch said, "Mr. Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be give free reign [sic]. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to place reasonable limits on the expression of hatred."[47] The National Post subsequently defended Steyn and sharply criticized Lynch, stating that Lynch has "no clear understanding of free speech or the value of protecting it" and that "No human right is more basic than freedom of expression, not even the "right" to live one's life free from offence by remarks about one's ethnicity, gender, culture or orientation."[48]

The federal Canadian Human Rights Commission dismissed the Canadian Islamic Congress' complaint against Maclean's in June 2008. The CHRC's ruling said of the article that, "the writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike." However, the Commission ruled that overall, "the views expressed in the Steyn article, when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature, as defined by the Supreme Court."[49]

Steyn later wrote a lengthy reflection of his turmoil with the commissions and the tribunals. The reflection appears as the introduction to The Tyranny of Nice,[50] a book authored by Kathy Shaidle and Pete Vere on Canada's human rights commissions. In it, Steyn writes:

I've learned a lot of lessons during my time in the crosshairs of the [Canadian human rights investigator Jennifer] Lynch mob. Although the feistier columnists have spoken out on this issue, the broad mass of Canadian media seems generally indifferent to a power grab that explicitly threatens to reduce them to a maple-flavoured variant of Pravda. One boneheaded "journalism professor" even attempted to intervene in the British Columbia trial on the side of the censors. As some leftie website put it, "Defending freedom of speech for jerks means defending jerks." Well, yes. But, in this case, not defending the jerks means not defending freedom of speech for yourself. It's not a left/right thing; it's a free/unfree thing. But an alarming proportion of the Dominion's "media workers" seem relatively relaxed about playing the role of eunuchs to the Trudeaupian sultans.

One of the big lessons of these last four years is that many, many beneficiaries of Western civilization loathe that civilization, and the media are generally inclined to blur the extent of that loathing.

Sourced

On
Culture

"Bisexuality is the proportional representation of sexuality in
a world where most of us - straight or gay - operate a
first-past-the-post system." ~ "Sorry, but voters prefer
straight choices", Daily Telegraph, 31 January
2006

"In the multicultural West, our values are that we have no
values: we accord all values equal value; the wittering English
feminist concerned that her tolerance is implicitly intolerant or
the Sudanese wife-beater and compulsory clitorectomy scheduler." ~
"The slyer virus: The West's
anti-westernism", The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 6,
February 2002

"As for 'cultural genocide', if there's any going on these
days, it's the genocide of the Britannic inheritance - in North
America, in the Antipodes, in Blair's Britain." ~ "The slyer virus: The West's
anti-westernism", The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 6,
February 2002

"To London's Europhiles, Britain is obviously "part of" Europe.
But, in the age of jet travel, cellphones, wire transfers and the
internet, we are less bound by physical proximity than ever. Yet
Britain for the first time in history has chosen to be imprisoned
by geography and to disconnect itself from its own culture." ~ "The slyer virus: The West's
anti-westernism", The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 6,
February 2002

"As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that
the sterile white-bread cultures of Britain, Canada and Australia
get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening
ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But in the case of
those Muslim ghettoes - in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, Copenhagen
and Manchester - multiculturalism means that the worst attributes
of Muslim culture - the subjugation of women - combine with the
worst attributes of Western culture - licence and
self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs
swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a
product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in
the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the
crudest assaults on its most cherished causes - women's rights and
gay rights - the political elite turns squeamishly away." — "Battered Westerner Syndrome
inflicted by myopic Muslim defenders", column, 23 August
2002

"We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they
thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least
considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are
just as racist. The only difference is they think the wogs can
never reform: good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not
to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to
it." — "Battered Westerner Syndrome
inflicted by myopic Muslim defenders", column, 23 August
2002

"As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this
territory, I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western
culture - rule of law, universal suffrage - is preferable to Arab
culture. That's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia,
and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support
immigration, but with assimilation." ~ "Battered Westerner Syndrome
inflicted by myopic Muslim defenders", column, 23 August
2002

"The great thing about multiculturalism is it doesn't involve
knowing anything about other cultures - the capital of Bhutan, the
principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling
good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I think
was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea
that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an
advanced Western society." ~ "It's the Demography,
Stupid," column, 4 January 2006

On
Western Civilization

"As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it, "Civilizations die
from suicide, not murder", as can be seen throughout much of the
Western world right now. The progressive agenda - lavish social
welfare, abortion, agnosticism, multiculturalism - is collectively
the real suicide bomb." — "It's the Demography,
Stupid", column, 4 January 2006

"Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not
survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear
within our lifetimes, including many if not all European
countries." ~ "It's the Demography,
Stupid", column, 4 January 2006

"Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after
the neutron bomb; the grand buildings will still be standing, but
the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a
remarkable period: the self-extinction of the race who, for good or
ill, shaped the modern world." — "It's the Demography,
Stupid", column, 4 January 2006

"A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and
end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind"
question is more urgent than most of us expected. The Western
world, as a concept, is dead and the West, as a matter of
demographic fact, is dying." ~ "It's the Demography,
Stupid", column, 4 January 2006

On US
Politics

On John Edwards, U.S. Senator from North Carolina: "The stump
speech of pretty-boy Senator John Edwards, which I've heard often
enough to be able to mouth along with him, has room for everything,
including vivid, wrenching portraits of despair: 'Tonight somewhere
in America a ten-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping
and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she
doesn't have the coat to keep her warm.' You'd have to have a heart
of stone not to be doubled up in laughter at that line." — "It's the war, stupid", 1
March 2004

On protests against going to war with Iraq : "One woman
bore a picture of some female genitalia – possibly hers, the
provenance was obscure – over the caption 'This Bush Is For Peace.'
Another waxed eloquent: 'Trim Bush.' Out in Marin County somewhere,
other bushes for peace disrobed, lay down on a hillside, and formed
the words 'No War.' I wonder if there are any conflicted nudists,
with a bush for Iraq and a rack for Bush." — The
Spectator, 25 January 2003

On Al Gore: "The Eco-Messiah sternly talks up the old Nazi
comparisons: "what we're facing is an ecological Holocaust, and the
evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of
glass shattering in Berlin." That 221,000 kilowatt-hours might
suggest that, if this is the ecological Holocaust, Gore's pad is
Auschwitz. But, as his spokesperson would no doubt argue, when
you're faced with ecological Holocausts and ecological
Kristallnachts, sometimes the only way to bring it to an end is
with an ecological Hiroshima. The Gore electric bill is the
eco-atom bomb: you have to light up the world in order to save it."
Chicago Sun Times March 4 2007

On European
Politics

On the French view of international politics: "According to my
dictionary, the word 'ally' comes from the Old French. Very Old
French, I'd say. For the New French, the word has a largely
postmodern definition of 'duplicitous charmer who undermines you at
every opportunity.'" ~ The Australian, 23 February
2007

"The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but
"We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment
and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes to
mind. Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's Defence
Minister at the time, insisted that the United States was dedicated
to the "organized cretinization of our people." As a dismissal of
American pop culture - MTV, Disney - this statement is not without
its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the
misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But
the reality is that nobody is as dedicated to the proposition that
the people are cretins than M. Chevenement and the panjandrums of
the new 'Europe.' The EU is organized on this assumption. If, like
the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the
wrong box in referenda on deeper European integration, we'll just
keep asking and re-asking the question until they get it right." ~
"The slyer virus: The West's
anti-westernism", The New Criterion Vol. 20, No. 6,
February 2002

On British
Politics

On David Cameron's Conservative Party: "The carbon emissions
trading system imposed by Kyoto is absurd and entirely ineffectual,
but in London, David Cameron wants to apply it to hamburgers.
Cameron wants to impose some sort of Kyoto-esque calorie trading
system on fast-food purveyors whereby McDonald's would have some
trans-fat cap imposed to ensure they pick up the tab for what that
$3 Big Mac really costs society. And David Cameron is the leader of
the alleged Conservative Party. He's also living in a country whose
major cities have been hollowed out by Islamist cells.
Nevertheless, as England decays into Somalia with chip shops,
taxing the chip shops is the Conservatives' priority." ~
Chicago Sun-Times, 28 January 2007

Attributed

On America's international image: "The fanatical Muslims
despise America because it's all lapdancing and gay porn; the
secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again
Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America
because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too
Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it's too
imperialist."

On the CIA: "The CIA now functions in the same relation to
President Bush as Pakistan's ISI does to General Musharraf. For
Musharraf, the problem is the significant faction in the ISI that
would like to kill him. Fortunately for Bush, if anyone at the CIA
launched a plot to kill him, they would probably take out G. W.
Bish, who runs a feed store in Idaho."

On Canadian
Politics

On Quebec: "The dumbest secession movement in the world: they
want to leave Canada in order to set up a country that looks
exactly the same - confiscatory taxation, moribund health service,
no mail service on weekends."

On Canadian health care: "Unlike Britain but like North Korea,
in Her Majesty's northern Dominion the public health system is such
an article of faith that no private hospitals are permitted;
'America' is the name of Canada's private health care system."

On the Canadian flag: "At least the Red Ensign had the guts to
be a boring flag, not a propaganda symbol."

On Denmark's flag planted on Arctic land claimed by Canada:
"There's something Danish in the state of rotten."

On Europe and the
European Union (EU)

"The EU's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has
decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the
Continent. The problem, as reported in The Telegraph, is that the
survey had found that 'many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out
by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups', and so a 'political
decision' was taken not to publish it amid fears it would 'increase
hostility towards Muslims.' Let's go back over that slowly and try
not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual
epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a
hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against extremist
Muslims."

"Europe's ruling class has effortlessly refined Voltaire: I disapprove of
what you say, and I will defend to the death my right not to listen
to you say it.

You might disapprove of what Le Pen says on immigration, but to
declare that the subject cannot even be raised is profoundly
unhealthy for a democracy. The problem with the old one-party
states of Africa and Latin America was that they criminalized
dissent; you could no longer criticize the President, you could
only kill him. In the three-party one-party states of Europe, a
similar process is under way: if the political culture forbids
politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will
turn to unrespectable politicians, as they are doing in France,
Austria, Belgium, Denmark and elsewhere. Le Pen is not an
aberration but the logical consequence."

"If Adolf Hitler were to return from wherever he is right now,
what would he be most steamed about? That in some countries there
are laws banning Nazi symbols and making Holocaust denial a crime?
No, because that would testify to the force and endurance of his
ideas — that 60 years on they're still so potent the state has to
suppress them. What would bug him the most is that on Broadway and
in the West End, Mel Brooks is peddling Nazi shtick in The
Producers and audiences are howling with laughter. One reason why
the English-speaking democracies were the only advanced nations not
to fall for Nazism or Fascism is they simply found it too
ridiculous."

On
Culture

On Christmas: "The
Jews - the Ellis Island/Lower East Side generation - were merely
the latest contributors to the American Christmas. For their first
two centuries on this continent, the Anglo-Celtic settlers attached
no significance to Christmas: it was another working day, unless it
fell on a Sunday, in which case one went to church. It was later
waves of immigrants — the Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians — who
introduced most of the standard features we know today — trees,
cards, Santa. Nothing embodies the American idea — e pluribus unum
— better than the American Christmas. This is genuine
multiculturalism: if the worry is separation of church and state,
the American Christmas is surely the most successful separation you
could devise - Jesus, Mary and Joseph are for home and church; the
great secular trinity of Santa, Rudolph and Frosty are for school
and mall."

On the movie Monster: "I confess I went into the movie
ready to dislike Miss Theron. I'm sick of newspaper articles
detailing the amount of time, talent and technical wizardry
required to turn some silver-screen beauty into an average-looking
woman. There are plenty of average-looking women out there — gritty
Britty TV drama seems to be full of them — and it seems excessively
unfair that they can't even get a shot at the frumpy roles because
Nicole Kidman's hogging the false nose again."

"If you look at the range of Hollywood movies playing in most
cities in the developing world, you'd hate the America they portray
as well."

On
International Affairs

On the Israeli-Arab conflict: "In fact, there is a Palestinian
state: it's called Jordan, whose population has always been
majority Palestinian. It's not as big a state as it used to be, but
that's because King Hussein, in the worst miscalculation of his
long bravura highwire act, made the mistake of joining Nasser's
1967 war to destroy Israel. Hence the 'occupied territories' -
they're occupied because the Arabs attacked Israel and lost."

On Newsweek's flushed Koran story: "In a way, both the U.S.
media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands
are very similar; they're both highly parochial and monumentally
self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world
and are prone to fanatical, irrational, indestructible beliefs —
not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of
Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim
no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's
executive washroom."

On the United Nations and Darfur: "The good people of Darfur
have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two
years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing
deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep
grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan
took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what
was going on. They eventually reported back that it wasn't
genocide. Thank goodness for that. Because, as yet another
Kofi-appointed UN committee boldly declared, "genocide anywhere is
a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated." So,
fortunately, what's happening in the Sudan is not genocide. It's
just hundreds of thousands of corpses who happen to be from the
same ethnic group, which means the UN can go on tolerating it until
everyone's dead, at which point the so-called "decent left" can
support a "multinational" force under the auspices of the Arab
League going in to ensure the corpses don't pollute the water
supply."

On the Iraq war: "Another six weeks of insurgency sounds about
right, after which it will peter out..."

On US
Politics

On Judge Roberts' Senate confirmation hearings: "I would be in
favor of these nomination hearings continuing on for another three
months, three years, until the last registered Democrat on the
planet has expired in shame at the pitiful spectacle of these 20
minute questions, content-free questions, dancing around a lot of
irrelevant issues that only expose the Senators' lack of
understanding of the matters they are supposed to be dealing
with."

On British
Politics

On Cherie
Blair and 'Cheriegate': "Nude models, diet quacks, psychics: I
cannot speak for Britain, but in North America these are three of
the four categories of person that most of us spend the first 10
minutes of our day dumping from the in-box. If Cherie had a fourth
confidante with a guaranteed plan to increase the length of Tony's
penis by three inches, the Blairs would have a full set. They could
throw the perfect spam dinner party."

On the 1997 UK General Election: "For those who can't stand the
me-tooness of it, there are all kinds of malcontents' parties on
the ballot this time, johnny-come-latelies to Screaming Lord
Sutch's long-standing Monster Raving Loony Party. There's the
Natural Law Party, which believes in better government through
"yogic flying" - that is to say, bouncing vigorously up and down on
mattresses. If that worked, the Tories would be a shoo-in."

Quoting General Charles Napier on how the British dealt with
suttee in India: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows.
Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we
tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral
pyre. Beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow
your custom, and then we will follow ours."

About
Steyn

"The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds" ~ Prince Turki
al-Faisal, Saudi Ambassador to the United Kingdom ([1])

"Mark is not a Jew, but he plays one on TV." ~ Caroline Glick,
The Jerusalem Post ([2])

"Our treatment plants will always be ready to receive the
literary outpourings emanating from his most humane soil" ~ Ghazi
Algosaibi, Minister of Water and Sewage, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
([3])